A quick and dirty guide to version 2.0 of the package definition file package.xml

The package definition file package.xml is,
as the name already implies, a well-formed XML file that contains
all information about a PEAR package. Version 2.0 contains several important
enhancements over version 1.0, including

Channel support

Binary PECL packages support (not fully implemented in PEAR 1.4.0)

More specific dependency resolution

For those of you with an existing package.xml version 1.0, you can create an approximate
equivalent package using the

$ pear convert

command. Note that as of version 1.6.0,
PEAR_PackageFileManager supports package.xml
2.0 with the PEAR_PackageFileManager2 class.

PECL developers: for more information on pecl-specific features,
read here.

package.xml version 2.0 is supported from PEAR 1.4 on.
As of 2007-04, PEAR 1.4 or greater is used in more than 99.8% of all
installations in the wild that downloaded packages - there is no need
to support v1.0 for backwards compatibility anymore.

OldPackage</extends>
<summary>Any one-line summary</summary>
<description>any static long description.
This text should not change very much between releases, use the "notes" tag
for release notes
</description>